, twitchy with Hugh's whining.

Kennicott came home, grumbled, "What the devil is the kid yapping
about?"

"I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!"

He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing
discolored suspenders.

"Why don't you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that
hideous vest?" she complained.

"Too much trouble. Too hot to go up-stairs."

She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked
at her husband. She regarded his table-manners. He violently chased
fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife
after gobbling them. She was slightly sick. She asserted, "I'm
ridiculous. What do these things matter! Don't be so simple!" But she
knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of
the table.

She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were
like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants.

Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner.

She realized that Kennicott's clothes were seldom pressed. His coat was
wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose. His shoes
were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness. He refused
to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and
prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house. She
peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of starched linen.
She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had
begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis
of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a
while yet."

He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three
times a week. This morning had not been one of the three times.

Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often
spoke of the "sloppy dressing" of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men
who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars.

Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening.

She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of
cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate
and urban. That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured
fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring.
They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love.

She rem